Health and Science Reporting

Climate change. The future of food. Sports psychology. Dark matter. Addiction. Personal tech. As a health and science reporter, you get to indulge your curiosity about the world and shed light on some of the biggest stories of our time.

You’ll mine data to find new perspectives on social issues, from obesity to gun violence, and explore the impacts of climate change and how communities are adapting.

You’ll police the $3 trillion spent each year on U.S. health care, money that too often benefits hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies instead of sick people.

You’ll sift through research, eliminating jargon and hype. You’ll also interview top experts in fields from infectious disease to robotics, and tell dramatic human stories, through audio and video, data visualizations, and well-constructed narratives.

6. Will training in health & science reporting help me cover social issues such as the obesity epidemic, transgender rights, and assisted suicide? Will it help me cover psychology, sports, and food?

Yes. Health and science reporting opens up the world of expert sources—scientists, psychologists, public health officials and medical researchers. These professionals study gun violence, fad diets, texting, life extension—just about anything you can think of. Tapping their expertise allows health and science journalists to provide facts and perspectives that other reporters miss.

Ben Powers, ’19, investigated the psychology of cringiness for the Science Journalism class, and Popular Science bought the story.

Molly Enking, ’18, revealed in PBS NewsHour the lengths to which women go to give birth naturally after a previous C-section, because doctors often consider the practice riskier than it really is.

Lori Freshwater, ’17, and Brett Dahlberg, ’17, wrote an expose in the Village Voice about a New York doctor who sexually abused patients.

Amy Mackinnon, ’18, described in Tonic an increasingly common eating disorder called diabulimia, in which people with type 1 diabetes lose weight by skipping their insulin shots, often with devastating health consequences.